Your Keyword List Is Evidence: The Lumosity Count

what did the ftc allege about lumosity's adwords buy?

FTC alleged that Lumos Labs, the company behind the Lumosity brain-training app, built its Google AdWords campaign directly around the population it claimed to help. The January 5, 2016 complaint, filed in the Northern District of California as case 3:16-cv-00001, states the company "purchased hundreds of keywords, including many variations of words related to memory, attention, intelligence, brain, cognition, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease." The same complaint alleges Lumosity claimed its program would "delay age-related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease" — the keyword list and the claim describe the same audience.

We read the complaint end to end; the keyword line sits inside the marketing-practices section, not the claims section.

The case closed as a settlement, not a trial verdict, so none of this was proven in court. Lumos Labs paid $2 million against a judgment set at $50 million, per the FTC's January 2016 press release, and the order barred the specific claims the keyword list had been aimed at.

why does a keyword purchase count as a representation at all?

A keyword purchase counts as a representation because FDA's intended-use test looks at marketing conduct as a whole, not at label text in isolation. Under 21 CFR 201.128, a product's intended use is the objective intent of whoever is legally responsible for its labeling, and that intent can be shown by advertising matter or by the circumstances surrounding how the product is distributed — a keyword list is squarely both. FTC's parallel standard treats a statement anywhere across the funnel the same way, which puts search-campaign settings inside the reviewable record along with the ad and the landing page.

Context decides the claim, and a keyword list is context.

FDA settled where memory and cognition sit on this line back in 2000, and the boundary runs in both directions. Mild age-related memory problems can carry a lawful structure/function claim, but per FDA's final structure/function rule, "Uncommon or serious conditions like senile dementia... will continue to be treated as diseases under the final rule," and Alzheimer's disease sits on that same list by name.

how can on-site copy stay compliant while the keyword file does not?

On-site copy alone can't cover for a keyword file that targets disease terms, because the record FDA and FTC build is cumulative rather than page-by-page. The same principle that makes a pre-lander count as evidence even when it never sells anything itself applies one layer up, to the media-buying settings that decide who sees the pre-lander in the first place. A landing page that says "supports normal memory function" while the keyword list bids on "reverse dementia naturally" and "Alzheimer's cure" doesn't read as two separate documents to an investigator — it reads as one campaign, where the compliant half was written to survive a screenshot and the targeting half was written to convert. The mismatch is often more damning than either half alone, because it shows the advertiser understood the line and chose to work around it rather than cross it by accident.

Screenshots don't capture targeting settings, but discovery does.

If you're the one setting the keyword list, that mismatch is a risk you created, not one your copywriter created.

what does the same logic do to audience definitions and lookalikes?

The same logic extends to any audience descriptor that names a diagnosis, because FDA has already treated an audience list as its own category of evidence. In a 2025 warning letter concerning a nasal-inhalation product marketed as AlzClipp, FDA cited an intended-audience block on the site naming "Alzheimer's disease patients" and "Individuals diagnosed with various types of dementia" as evidence the product was intended as a drug, listed alongside the efficacy claims rather than separate from them. The same catch-all that reaches keyword lists, 21 CFR 101.93(g)(2)(x), covers anything that suggests an effect on a disease, and a "who this is for" block suggests one as directly as a "what this does" claim.

The same swap shows up outside memory copy. A thyroid symptom cluster named without the word "thyroid" still functions as a disease claim under FDA's lay-terminology test, and an audience description built from the same symptom cluster carries the same risk.

Platform rules now restrict the retargeting move that would otherwise paper over this. Google classifies health conditions as a sensitive interest category, and per its restricted-targeting policy, advertisers in that category can't use Customer Match, lookalike segments or audience expansion — only Google's predefined audiences remain, which removes the lookalike-seeded-from-buyers workaround before the intended-use question ever comes up.

• Higher-risk audience language: "for Alzheimer's disease patients," "diagnosed with dementia," "caregivers managing a loved one's cognitive decline"
• Lower-risk audience language: "adults 55+ interested in memory support," "people who want sharper focus day to day"

does a negative-keyword gap read the same way as an intentional buy?

We could not verify this, and it matters. The Lumos Labs complaint describes an affirmative act — the company "purchased hundreds of keywords" tied to dementia and Alzheimer's — not an automated broad-match spillover from an underspecified negative-keyword list. Whether FTC or FDA has ever treated the second fact pattern, a gap rather than a purchase, as equivalent evidence of intent is a question no document in our research answered, and we looked specifically for one.

Intent is assessed objectively, from circumstances, not from what the advertiser meant to do.

That objective standard cuts against assuming a gap is automatically safer than a purchase. A negative-keyword list left unmaintained for a year, letting ads serve against "cure my mother's Alzheimer's" searches, is still a circumstance surrounding distribution, even if nobody typed those words into a buy sheet. What would settle this is a case or agency guidance addressing match-type or negative-keyword practices by name; we found none.

why did the ftc frame both lumosity and prevagen as preying on fear?

FTC framed both cases around fear because its underlying harm theory targets exploitation of a vulnerable population's dread of decline, not just a false statistic. "The marketers of Prevagen preyed on the fears of older consumers experiencing age-related memory loss," the Bureau of Consumer Protection's director said of the Prevagen case, per the FTC's January 2017 press release, and the agency used near-identical language a year earlier to describe Lumosity.

The keyword list is where that fear becomes traceable to a media buy.

Prevagen also shows how long this can run before it resolves. FTC sued in January 2017; after a dismissal, a Second Circuit revival and a full jury trial, the court finally ordered relief in December 2024, seven years of litigation over cognitive-benefit claims for a jellyfish-derived protein sold at $24 to $68 a bottle.

what else in an ad account is discoverable?

Keywords and audience lists are two items on a much longer discoverable list, and FDA and FTC have cited nearly every layer of a funnel at some point. Blog posts, Instagram hashtags, Facebook replies, affiliate networks and even the ad agency's own name have each shown up as evidence in a warning letter or complaint. The table below draws each example from a specific, dated case rather than from a general warning.

None of these needed the word "Alzheimer's" printed on the ad itself.

what would a defensible keyword and audience policy look like?

A defensible policy starts before launch, not after a warning letter, and it treats the keyword file as label copy that happens to live in Google Ads instead of on the bottle. Build a negative-keyword list naming the disease terms adjacent to your category — Alzheimer's, dementia, diagnosed, plus the generic names of any prescription drug in the same class — and review it on the same schedule you review landing-page copy. Write audience descriptions in function language your product can defend, "adults 55+ interested in memory support," rather than diagnosis language it can't, "caregivers of Alzheimer's patients."

Date every keyword and audience decision, because intent is judged at the time it was made.

For the messaging you genuinely can't run through paid search without crossing the line — anything naming a diagnosis, a drug, or a lab value — an owned list you email and text directly sidesteps the platform-targeting question, though it doesn't sidestep FTC substantiation, FDA's disease-claim rules, or the same intended-use test applied to what you actually send.

Quick decision checklist

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For deeper evaluation, continue through Nutra niche intelligence directory, Best GEOs for Nutra Offers in 2026: A Data Tier List, Supplement Ad Spy: How to Find Scaling Nutra Ads Fast, Methylene Blue Offers: A Biohacker Ad Wave Decoded, TikTok Supplement Ads: What Scales and What's Banned, and GLP-1 affiliate marketing intelligence. These related Daily Intel pages connect this topic to the relevant methodology, pricing, trust context, comparison path, or niche workflow.